Food advertising: When children miss the point

MILLIONS of dollars are spent on food advertising, but how effective are they? If children can’t distinguish apple slices from french fries, and don’t even notice the milk in fast-food kid’s meals, advertisers and food companies have to do a lot of re-evaluating.  

A research conducted by Dartmouth-Hitchcock Norris Cotton Cancer Centre says that one-half to one-third of children (ages 3-7) did not identify milk when shown McDonald’s and Burger King children’s advertising images depicting that product. Sliced apples in Burger King’s ads were identified as apples by only 10% of young viewers; instead most reported they were french fries.

“Burger King’s depiction of apple slices as ‘Fresh Apple Fries’ was misleading to children in the target age range,” said principal investigator James Sargent, MD, co-director Cancer Control Research Program at Norris Cotton Cancer Centre. “The advertisement would be deceptive by industry standards, yet their self-regulation bodies took no action to address the misleading depiction.”

In 2010, McDonald’s and Burger King began to advertise apples and milk in kids meals. Mr Sargent and his colleagues studied fast food television ads aimed at children from July 2010 through June 2011. In this study researchers extracted “freeze frames” of Kids Meals shown in TV ads that appeared on Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, and other children’s cable networks. Of the four healthy food depictions studied, only McDonald’s presentation of apple slices was recognised as an apple product by a large majority of the target audience, regardless of age. Researchers found that the other three presentations represented poor communication.

This Dartmouth study follows an earlier investigation conducted by Mr Sargent and his colleagues, which found that McDonald’s and Burger King children’s advertising emphasised giveaways like toys or box office movie tie-ins to develop children’s brand awareness for fast food chains, despite self-imposed guidelines that discourage the practice.  It appears in JAMA Pediatrics (March 31, 2014),  and was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Healthy Eating Research programme.

View the videotape of responses from children participating in the study : http://youtu.be/Tl9uHUeWztY